Is there a way for these sites to facilitate barter transactions? Some of them, like SwapVillage and MrSwap, have attempted to bridge the gap between barter and direct buying by inventing their own currencies, which can be used to even out a trade or make outright purchases of items.

MrSwap asks users to assign values to the items they want to trade in "SwapPoints" and then negotiate trades based on the valuations they give their own stuff. As it turns out, a SwapPoint is vaguely like a dollar, but harder to understand and not transferable beyond the listings of MrSwap. At SwapVillage you're asked to use "VillageDollars" to make purchases or compensate for an uneven trade.

After about half an hour of trying to figure out these new currencies and sifting through hundreds of items I either didn't want or could easily find at any local used-book or CD store, I abandoned both MrSwap and SwapVillage.

I concluded that barter on the Web was one of those ideas that sounds great in theory, but doesn't work in practice.

Online swapping is aggravating, unnecessary—and anything but efficient. It's a hungry consumer of that most precious commodity: time. The beauty of an online auction site like EBay is that the consumer is always in control; she wins or loses the goods based on her own decision to keep bidding.

Not so on barter sites. Here the consumer enters a labyrinth of haggling without any obvious outcome, is forced to navigate sets of obscure rules that try to redefine simple principles of commerce and, if a transaction is agreed to, the junk must then be packed and shipped to someone else.

No surprise, then, that one of the most trafficked and best-run sites, WebSwap, has scrambled to shift its business model to a more consumer-to-consumer retail site where people can easily buy, sell or, sometimes, swap. With more than a million unique visitors last July, 170,000 registered users and an average of 300,000 listings, WebSwap is in a good position to survive an inevitable shakeout among online barter sites.

In March, the company hired Jan Gullet, formerly the CEO of PlanetWeb and a veteran of such offline companies as Procter & Gamble and Pepsi. Gullet quickly went to work, overhauling both the site and business model. "We had built a lot of our focus around negotiations, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming," says Gullet.

He scrapped all fees for buyers and sellers, made it easier to buy rather than barter and added databases of book and music titles. He also mandated that both buyers and sellers have a credit card on file so WebSwap can insure that no one backs out of a transaction and that sellers are paid on time. The new site launched at the end of July.

But it's hard to see how even the revamped WebSwap can compete with the big auction and fixed-price sites. In June, bargain-basement site Half.com was acquired by EBay, creating an online auction and retail behemoth with unparalleled traffic and listings. And, on WebSwap, most of the descriptions still lack images and important details like brand, condition, dimensions and shipping information.

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